Residents of the central Afghanistan city of Bamiyan said the statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Hazara minority politician who was killed while he was a Taliban prisoner in the 1990s, was partially demolished. In 2001, the latter sparked an international outcry by destroying the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues.
“The statue was destroyed last night. They used an explosive, “a neighbor told AFP on condition of anonymity, without being able to say with certainty who had committed this act. The head of the statue was unscrewed, but the rest were still standing.
One resident, who asked to be identified only as Zara, blamed the Taliban more directly, saying that a group of their fighters used a rocket launcher to damage the statue. “The statue is destroyed and the people are sad, but also scared,” he said.
The predominantly Shiite Hazara community, which makes up between 10 and 20 percent of the 38 million Afghans, has long been persecuted by Sunni extremists in a country torn by ethnic and religious divisions.
They have often been targeted by the Taliban and the jihadist group Islamic State, who consider them heretics. In Kabul in May, more than 80 people, mostly high school students, were killed in a bomb attack on a girls’ school in a neighborhood populated mainly by Hazara Shiites.
